This is a gripping, informative, and well-researched book
about human blood. An accomplished journalist, Rose George, covers a variety of
topics, largely in the U.S., Britain, and Canada but also in Nepal, India, and
South Africa. She describes many current
issues, provides historical background, and speculates on future technologies,
such as replacement of blood by other fluids. There are nine sections:

“My Pint” While
the book’s title refers to the author's volume of blood, this chapter’s title refers
to a single pint she is donating. We read about blood supply (donated
and stored blood) in the U.S. and—by contrast—in India.

“The Most Singular and Valuable Reptile” refers to the
leech. This arresting chapter describes both historical and modern uses of
leeches to gather blood from humans. She visits a company called Biopharm in Wales where leeches are raised and prepared for shipment to medical clinics and
hospitals.

“Janet and Percy” is a historical chapter focusing on Dame Janet Maria Vaughan, a central figure in creating the Blood
Transfusion Service in England during WWII and Percy Oliver, who guided its
predecessor, the London Blood Transfusion Service.

“Blood Borne.”
This chapter describes Khayelitsha, South Africa, “the ugly backside of
Cape Town” (p. 100): a place of poverty, crime, rape, sexual predation, and
HIV. While rich nations provide assessment and treatment for people with HIV,
poor nations have many citizens infected with the virus and, over time, rising
rates of infection.

“The Yellow Stuff” describes the plasma portion of
blood; it can be frozen (as FFP) and used as a filler for bleeding or trauma
patients. Unlike blood—which can only be
given without payment—plasma can be collected from paid donors. It is a largely
traded commodity, part of a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. Plasma
carries Factor VIII, a crucial protein for clotting blood; hemophiliacs lack
this and are at risk for death by bleeding externally or internally. Some
plasma has been tainted, for example by HIV.

“Rotting Pickles.”
In Western Nepal (and other places), menstruation is taboo. George writes, “We are in a
minority among species, and among mammals, to bleed every month.” She reviews
historical views of women’s periods, mostly negative. Worldwide, there are many
taboos, but also some educational efforts for public health that are helpful in
impoverished areas.

“Nasty Cloths.” This tells the unusual story of an Indian
man named Muruga, “a poorly educated workshop helper” who became a leader in
creating sanitary protection for menstruating women. Worldwide, the feminine
hygiene industry is some $23 billion. George also reviews related history, including
Toxic Shock Syndrome from tampons.

“Code Red.” Bleeding is often a fatal factor in
trauma, even with the best efforts to transfuse blood into the patient, unit
after unit. George observes open chest techniques at a resuscitation. She
reviews breakthroughs in blood typing, component therapy, and “buddy
transfusions.”

“Blood like Guinness: The Future.” George starts with
images from the past: vampires, human drinkers of blood, past and, even,
present. She interviews a purveyor of the concept that “young blood” is
healthier than older blood. Can there
be, discovered or created, blood substitutes that also save lives?

Hope Sze is a resident in family medicine aiming to qualify for the extra year in emergency medicine training. She has just moved from her medical school in London, Ontario, to begin residency in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Montreal. Her furniture and clothing have not yet arrived.

On orientation day, she meets her resident colleagues and takes a shine to Alex who clearly likes her too. But the excitement and anticipation of this new chapter in their lives is disrupted when the body of one of the attending physicians is found lying in the locker room. A “whodunnit” with medicine, romance, and suspense in which Hope makes a few mistakes but manages to identify the murderer and the motives.

Andrew Solomon’s 2012 book Far From the Treeis a study of families with children who are different in all sorts of ways from their parents and siblings to degrees that altered and even threatened family functions and relationships. Years after its publication, director Rachel Dretzin collaborated with Solomon to produce this documentary based on his book. At the time of filming, the children were already adults or were well into their teens. The film looks at how the families came to accept these children and how they sought—with varying success—happiness.

The documentary focuses on five family scenarios: homosexuality (Solomon’s own story); Down syndrome; dwarfism; murder; and autism. Anyone in these families or anyone who knew these families would never invoke the familiar idiom “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” when talking about these children. These apples fell far from the tree, and Solomon builds on that twist to the idiom to characterize the relationship between the affected children and their families as “horizontal.” By extension, Solomon characterizes the relationship of children who are not different from their parents and siblings in any appreciable manner as “vertical.” Only one of the original characters from the book appears in the documentary; the other families are newly “cast.” The film captures the lives of these families with all their challenges and successes, and intercuts footage from home videos the families provided. Dretzin also filmed interviews with parents and in some cases their children. The footage and interviews show how families evolved in their acceptance of their children and their situations as best they could. The best was still heartbreak for some, but real happiness was achieved for others.

This
entertaining and wide-ranging book discusses the importance of the human foot
and many related topics. There are five alliteratively named chapters.
1. Destiny
Drawing on anthropological research, Rinzler discusses the
deep history of humans and their primate ancestors. Our bipedalism—our upright
stance—preceded our large brain, making possible a larger diet and working well
with our bodies as they evolved away from other primates. She discusses the
idealized ratios of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man. Leonardo considered our foot as
“a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art” (p. 6).

2. Disability
Rinzler discusses historical senses of disability, notably
clubfoot. She mentions various people with a clubfoot: Joseph Goebbels, Sir Walter Scott, King Tut,
Cludius I, Dudly Moore, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Mia Hamm; the last are two
successful athletes. Rinzler reviews the
history of surgical approaches, many of which were harmful. X-ray and
sonography provided new insights, and genetics may have further promise, given
that families and ethnic groups often have higher instances of clubfoot.

3. Difference
This chapter describes the anatomy of the foot, bones,
arches, tendons, and on as well as artistic representations and, of course,
ballet and other forms of dance. A footprint is as individual as the much-used
fingerprint. In Nazism and the American south, a flat foot was discriminated
against as Jewish or Negro. Various treatments have been proposed for flat
feet.

4. Diet
Gout has been known since antiquity, but only in modern
times has the underlying biochemistry and, now, genetic
heritage been understood. The chapter mentions many famous names of people who suffered from
gout. rheumatism, or corns. The closing pages discuss pharmaceutical
approaches.

5. Desire
The foot as sexual symbol: Rinzler discuss
folklore (Cinderella’s slipper), pheromones, and Biblical topics: God’s feet, footwashing, and feet as symbols
for sex and urination. Foot fetishism can be understood in terms of the lavish
sensory innervation that links to our brain. Discussion mentions the bound feet
of China, the folktale The Red Shoes, also Fifty
Shades of Grey, Sexand the City, and Judy Garland’s red
shoes in The Wizard of Oz

This is an important
contribution that analyzes, critiques, and aims to correct structural
inequalities (racism, sexism, capitalism) that influence contemporary medicine,
with particular attention to the technical influences of computers, “big data,”
and underlying values of neoliberalism, such as individualism, exceptionalism, capacity,
and progress through innovation.

Introduction:
Theorizing Communicative BiocapitalismBanner writes,
“biocapitalism is comprised by the new economies and industries that generate
value out of parts of human bodies” (p. 12). Parts include DNA, ova, and
organs, but there’s also data from medical care, where patients are reduced to
their physical bodies and/or to their “digital status” in medical records,
research, even personal information volunteered on the Web, all which is indicated
by the term “communicative.” As an example, Banner cites the large realm of patient on-line
groups that are exploited by large companies as free labor, thus reducing the
voice of the patients. Approaches of narrative medicine and medical humanities have
not dealt with digital health, market forces, and the implied power
relationships. Perhaps the new subfield of health humanities has promise to do
so, if not also captive to “the logic of the market” (p. 17).

Ch. 1. Structural Racism and Practices of Reading in
the Medical Humanities
Banner writes,
“Medical racism is a product of structural and institutional racism” (p. 25). She
finds that current approaches from interpretive reading are insufficient
because “the field’s whiteness has contoured its hermeneutics” (p. 25). Instead
of the “reading-for-empathy” model, we should read for structures of racism,
sexism, privilege, as well as economic and political inequality. She
illustrates such reading with texts by Junot Dìaz, Audre Lourde, and Anatole
Broyard.

Ch. 2. The Voice of the Patient in Communicative
Biocapitalism
Patients have
flocked to networking websites, voluntarily posting much personal information. Banner
analyzes how technocapitalists mine these sites for data to use or sell.
Patients’ information, given voluntarily, amounts to free labor and, even,
work-arounds for companies that avoid expensive double-blind controlled
studies. Rhetoric for these sites speak misleadingly of the “patient voice,” “stakeholder,”
or “story sharing” and hide the exploitation involved. The chapter is specific
for websites, drugs, and drug companies.
Banner discusses
(1) the “feminized labor” involved with sites for fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue
syndrome (both “contested diagnoses”) and (2), more abstractly, the
medicalization of the clinical gaze on patients who participate in websites and
yearn for “an imagined state of purity,” and/or “an ableist vision of norms and
reparative medicine” (p. 61). Overall, the digitalized-patient voice is
colonized by forces of whiteness and should be decolonized. She discusses writing
by Octavia Butler and Linda Hogan, both women of color.

Ch. 3. Capacity and the Productive Subject of
Digital Health
This fascinating
chapter describes and critiques “digital self-tracking,” or the use of devices
such as Fit-Bits that help create and maintain the so-called “Quantified Self”
(or “QS”). Banner finds this fad within the tradition of the Enlightenment (Ben
Franklin) so that “exact science” may “optimize” individuals by being “responsibilitized”
in a “self-sovereign” way. QS users understand that “Everything is data” (p. 83).
She argues that this trend emphasizes “masculine objectivity” while “disavowing
debility” (p. 85). Collected data may contribute to a “worried well” status or
conditions of “precarity” or “misfitting.” She writes, “QS practice remains an
inscription of the self as a self-surveillor, engaged in masculinized practices
of neoliberal self-management” (p. 91). She discusses the technologies of the
devices Scanadu, Melon, and Scarab. She provides and interprets photos of visual
arts representations by Laurie Frick, who is a “self-tracker.”

Ch. 4. Algorithms, the Attention Economy, and the
Breast Cancer Narrative
Banner discusses
Google Analytics, later Alphabet, which includes Calico and Verily, which have
partnered with pharmaceutical companies. Such combinations of algorithms,
capitalism, and media aim to capture the public’s attention, especially online.
Messaging about breast cancer becomes reductive, emphasizing medical solutions,
not prevention, and it avoids discussion of causes such as environmental
pollution. Some critics decry “pinkification” of breast cancer. Public stories,
such as Angelina Jolie’s, emphasize individual empowerment, a “hegemonic
construction of illness”’ (p. 112), and these are amplified by mass media, both
print and electronic. More diverse messages would value “heterophily over
homophily” (p.121).

Ch. 5. Against the Empathy Hypothesis
Drawing on
several commentators, Banner critiques the notion of empathy as a goal for
caregivers as condescending to the patient and suspect when allied with
productivity and efficiency for institutions. Further, the notion of “resilience”
(in a “bleed” of neoliberal rhetoric into health humanities) has been misused
in applied literature, parallel to notions of self-help and self-management.
Some hermeneutics still support values of “state and capitalism” and ignore
writers of color. Banner discusses the work of African-American poet Claudia
Rankine, some of whose work is “postlyric,” and J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The
Slave Ship” that illustrates “necropolitics.”

ConclusionThroughout the
book Banner illustrates reading “for structure” in her interpretation of texts
and visual images but also in medical institutions and practices and, still
further, in the enormous and pervasive world of government forms and programs,
big data, computers, and beyond. She finds structures of capitalism, sexism,
and neoliberalism within existing “heteropatriarchal, ableist, and racist
frameworks” (p. 154) despite claims of neutrality. She urges medicine and the
humanities to develop new methods. She mentions specific collectives and
communities that now challenge such norms (such as Gynepunk and CureTogether), and she calls for thinkers in many
disciplines to confront demeaning technology and to “engender spaces in which
care is more just, and more humane” (p. 156).

The narrator tracks a hypothetical week in the life and work
of a psychiatrist in a major Canadian hospital through the stories of
individual patients, some of whom were willing to be identified by name.

The book opens with “they are us” and the shocking discovery
that a patient whose life has been ruined by mental illness is a medical school
classmate.

Other patients have been followed for many years—a woman
with eating disorder, a man with bipolar disease, another with schizophrenia. A
new patient with intractable depression finally agrees to electroshock therapy,
and the first treatment is described. The painful duty of making an involuntary
admission pales in contrast to the devastation of losing a patient to suicide.
Goldbloom’s personal life, opinions, and worries are woven throughout with
frank honesty. His mother’s metastatic brain tumor sparks the associated
intimations of his own advancing age and mortality. His genuine fascination with and appreciation of
the effective modalities now available are matched by his frustration over how
they are beyond reach of far too many because of the stigma that is still
attached to mental illness and the lack of resources and political will to make
them available.

This powerful—even disturbing—book examines the state of
Louisiana, a home of the Tea Party, multiple polluting industries (oil,
chemicals), environmental degradation, bad health for all, including children,
and politics and economics that favor corporations not local business.

In Part One, “The Great Paradox,” sociologist Hochschild interviews locals,
attends civic events, sits in cafes, and listens to stories. Bit by bit she
understands that right-leaning people believe in Republican notions of less
governmental regulation despite suffering from the ill effects of living in “red”
states, even individual counties, that are the most polluted in the U.S. (pp.
79-80). She calls this disparity “the great paradox.” Locals call a
portion of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans “Cancer Alley”
(p. 62), but there is no popular demand for control of pollution.

Part Two, “The Social Terrain” discusses history. Earlier,
Louisiana had economies of fishing and farming in tune with the landscape. New
industries, including Big Oil changed all that, with promises of jobs and
wealth for all—neither of which occurred, because oil is largely mechanized,
and wealth went to corporations, some headquartered in other countries.
Further, there was not just pollution but also large sinkholes and the BP
Horizon blow-out of 2010. Problems of on-going pollution were ignored by the
Press, especially Fox news, and the “Pulpit” (evangelistic Christianity) took
the longer view, urging continued human exploitation of nature, patience for
ultimate rewards, and the hope that “the rapture” would ultimately save the
most worthy Christians.

Part Three is “The Deep Story and the People in it.”
Hochschild formulates an unspoken but motivating narrative of values in
Louisiana. This metaphoric story represents deep feelings, including urges for
a success that is always thwarted. In the story, there is a long line of white,
Christian people, mostly male, often with limited education, waiting in line
patiently to climb a hill. On the other side is a good job, wealth, security,
and reward for the long waiting. Tragically, there are “line cutters,”
symbolized by President Obama and other blacks who had various preferments, but
also women, also immigrants, also refugees, even the brown pelican, the
Louisiana state bird that needs clean water and fish to survive. The people in
line feel betrayed. Where is progress toward the American Dream? Fair play?
There is hatred toward the line cutters, and loyalty toward the similar people
in line and the industries that will save them. Pollution is unfortunate but a
necessary cost.

“Going National” is the fourth part. Hochschild reviews the
plantations of the South that not only brutalized slaves but also caused poor
whites to move to non-productive land, while the wealthy always improved their
lot. People from the North were (and are) suspect, with policies of
integration, abortion, gun control, etc. The North cut in line. People in
Louisiana became “strangers in their own land” and therefore glad to support
not only Governor Bobby Jindal (who “left the state in shambles,” p. 232) but
also Trump who would “make American great again.” The “strangers” have gone
national in the U.S. and even in some other countries. Hochschild drafts two
short “letters,” one to the liberal left and the other to the Louisiana people.
She suggests that the two polarized groups have more in common than they
currently imagine.

This Side of Doctoring is
an anthology published in 2002 about the experiences of women in medicine. While
the essays span multiple centuries, most are from the past 50 years. They reflect
on a multitude of stages in the authors’ personal and professional lives. In
344 pages divided into twelve sections, including "Early Pioneers,"
"Life in the Trenches," and "Mothering and Doctoring," the
146 authors recount - in excerpts from published memoirs, previously published
and unpublished essays, poems and other writings, many of them composed solely
for this collection - what it was then and what it was in 2002 to be a woman
becoming a doctor in the U.S.. All but a handful of the authors are physicians
or surgeons. There is a heavy representation from institutions on both coasts, especially
the Northeast. Four men were invited to reflect on being married to physician
wives. There is one anonymous essay concerning sexual harassment and a final essay
from a mother and daughter, both physicians.Beginning with the first American female physicians in the
mid-19th century, like historic ground-breakers Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary
Putnam Jacobi, the anthology proceeds through the phases of medical school,
residency, early and mid-careers, up to reflections from older physicians on a
life spent in medicine. Many of the authors have names well known in the
medical humanities, including Marcia Angell, Leon Eisenberg, Perri Klass,
Danielle Ofri, Audrey Shafer, and Marjorie Spurrier Sirridge, to mention a
few.

The essays and poems and letters have, as a partial listing, the following
subjects: family influences in becoming a physician; professional friendships; marriage;
children and their impact on a woman’s career in medicine; the decision not to
have children; ill family members; illness as a physician; establishing one's
sexuality as a physician; struggles with male physicians and their egos;
mentors, both female and male; memorable patients (often terminal or dying);
the life of a wife-physician, or mother-physician; the guilt and sacrifice that
accompany such a dual life; the importance - and easy loss - of personal time
or what internist Catherine Chang calls “self-care” (page 334).
The anthology also touches on how women have changed the
practice of medicine in various ways, prompted by the growing realization, as
family practice physician Alison Moll puts it, "that I didn't have to
practice in the traditional way" (page 185) The authors write about the wisdom of setting
limits; training or working part-time or sharing a position with another woman;
and the constant face-off with decisions, especially those not normally
confronting an American man becoming a doctor.
One conclusion is evident before the reader is halfway through the book: there
are many approaches to becoming a fulfilled female physician including finding
one’s identity in the field. Implicit in
most of the essays and writings is the lament from obstetrician-gynecologist
Gayle Shore Mayer: "Where is the self ? There are pieces
of me everywhere", (page 275) recalling a similar cry from Virginia
Woolf's Orlando, another essentially female soul trying to find what Richard
Selzer has called "The Exact Location of the Soul". Several authors discover that female physicians have
unique gifts to offer their patients. As internist Rebekah Wang-Cheng writes, “I
am a better physician because I am a mother, and I know because of my
experiences as a physician that I am a better mother.” (page 151)

There are sections at the end devoted to a glossary for the lay reader,
resources for women (as of 2002), and generous notes about the contributors
(which section also serves as a useful index of each's contributions).

This engaging memoir describes Pearson's medical training at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) on
Galveston Island from 2009 to 2016. During these years her personal values
become clear, and she finds fault in her training, in medicine as
practiced in Texas, and even in her own errors in treating patients.
Having left a graduate writing program,
Pearson took a "postbac," a year of pre-med courses in Portland,
Oregon. She interviewed at medical schools "all over the country" and
writes satirically about them; she concludes "nothing out of Texas felt
quite right," having lived there and done her undergraduate work at
University of Texas at Austin. She's a Spanish speaker with a
working-class background. When her classmates provide the annual
“white-trash”-themed party, she wonders, “do I go as myself?” (p. 21).

Pearson's education continues on three tracks:
the formal UTMB courses in medicine, a simultaneous Ph.D. program at the
Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas, and her
volunteer work at the St. Vincent's Student Run Free Clinic. The Ph.D. program
is off-stage, not mentioned, but the St. Vincent's Clinic becomes pivotal
to her development as a doctor and a moral person.

As for medical school, she finds the relentless
"truths of biochemistry and anatomy" so reductive that the suffering
of people and surrounding politics seem "not to matter at all" (p.
70). Among the politics are: the lack of safety nets for poor people, the use
of uninsured (including prisoners) for students to practice on, failures
to extend Medicare, pollution (notably from the oil industry), losses of
charitable care, and income disparities that include crushing poverty for many.
Something of a rebel, she writes that medical school "felt like junior
high" (p. 44). She does enjoy the "clinical encounters" with
real patients.

St. Vincent's, by contrast, was “a relief.” Her
pages sparkle with her conversation with clinic patients, some
homeless, all poor, and all suffering. She reports--confesses, she even
says--her errors that had consequences for patients. She writes that errors are
an unavoidable part of medical education, but that it's wrong that they should routinely
happen to the poorest members of society.

Chapter 8 discusses depression, which she
felt after the second year. She writes about high rates of suicide among
medical students and doctors; indeed a close friend killed himself during the
"post-doc" year. Because some states require doctors to report
psychiatric care, some doctors avoid such care. This consequence “drives a suicide-prone
population away from the help we may need" (p.92).

The last two years are the rotations through
specialties: surgery, dermatology, trauma, rural medicine,
neurology, internal medicine, and so on. These are clearly and
insightfully described. In one case (internal medicine), she allows the reader
to see the irony of a doctor providing hair removal by laser, diet foods, and
Botox treatment for wrinkles, “a pure luxury transaction” (p. 183).

Pearson describes the storms, hurricanes, and
floods that hit Galveston Island, also the pollution from the oil industry that
causes a “cancer belt” along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts (p. 104).
At last she finishes her program, understanding
that her identity is simultaneously a person, a physician, and a writer (p.
248).

Brockmeier
constructed this novel as six individual stories. No overriding plot carries
across all the stories, and none of the individual stories has much of a plot
either. But, each is tangentially related to the subsequent story through a
journal comprising love notes written daily by a husband to his wife that
passes from one story to the next.

I love the ball you curl into when you wake up in the
morning but don’t want to get out from under the covers. I love the last
question you ask me before bedtime. I love the way you alphabetize the CDs, but
arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks
like upholstery fabric. I love the scent of your hair just after you’ve taken a
shower… (p. 16)

The stories
share characters, but only insofar as they are involved in the transfer of the
journal.

Also connecting
the stories is a phenomenon in which visible light is produced from the location
of the body where there is pain, injury, or disease, and in one case an
inanimate object—the journal. It just started to happen.

The Illumination: who had coined the term, which pundit or editorial
writer, no one knew, but soon enough—within hours, it seemed—that was what
people were calling it. The same thing was happening all over the world. In
hospitals and prison yards, nursing home and battered women’s shelters,
wherever the sick and injured were found, a light could be seen flowing from
their bodies. Their wounds were filled with it, brimming. (p. 138)

The Illumination is part of every story, but never the main subject. It’s noticed, it’s
discussed, it’s contemplated, and eventually accommodated as part of daily
existence: “everyone began to
accept that pain now came coupled together with light.” (p. 139) The Illumination is always there, was always
there, and will always be there because “there is no such thing as photonic
degradation, that light was effectively immortal, or at least as immortal as
the universe itself.” (p. 256)